We develop technical tools that enable the use of Bellman functions for BMO defined on $α$-trees, which are structures that generalize dyadic lattices. As applications, we prove the integral John--Nirenberg inequality and an inequality relating $L^1$- and $L^2$-oscillations for BMO on $α$-trees, with explicit constants. When the tree in question is the collection of all dyadic cubes in $\mathbb{R}^n,$ the inequalities proved are sharp. We also reformulate the John--Nirenberg inequality for the continuous BMO in terms of special martingales generated by BMO functions. The tools presented can be used for any function class that corresponds to a non-convex Bellman domain.

17 pages, 1 figure